The Brazilian Northeast has long been a marginalized region with a complex relationship to national identity. It is often portrayed as impoverished, backward, and rebellious, yet traditional and culturally authentic. Brazil is known for its strong national identity, but national identities do not preclude strong regional identities. In Region Out of Place, Courtney J. Campbell examines how groups within the region have asserted their identity, relevance, and uniqueness through interactions that transcend national borders. From migration to labor mobilization, from wartime dating to beauty pageants, from literacy movements to representations of banditry in film, Campbell explores how the development of regional cultural identity is a modern, internationally embedded conversation that circulated among Brazilians of every social class. Part of a region-based nationalism that reflects the anxiety that conflicting desires for modernity, progress, and cultural authenticity provoked in the twentieth century, this identity was forged by residents who continually stepped out of their expected roles, taking their region’s concerns to an international stage.

A country warmly hospitable and surprisingly violent, physically beautiful, yet appallingly poor—these are the contrasts Joseph Page explores in The Brazilians, a monumental book on one of the most colorful and paradoxical places on earth.Once one of the strongest market economies in the world, Brazil now struggles to emerge from a deep economic and social crisis, the latest and deepest nose-dive in a giddy roller-coaster ride that Brazilians have experienced over the past three decades. Page examines Brazil in the context of this current crisis and the events leading up to it. In so doing, he reveals the unique character of the Brazilian people and how this national character has brought the country to where it is today—teetering on the verge of joining the First World, or plunging into unprecedented environmental calamity and social upheaval. Not since Luigi Barzini's The Italians has a society been so deeply and accurately portrayed.

São Paulo, Brazil, holds the largest number of Japanese descendants outside Japan, and they have been there for six generations. Japanese immigration to Brazil started in 1908 to replace European immigrants to work in São Paulo’s expanding coffee industry. It peaked in the late 1920s and early 1930s as anti-Japanese sentiment grew in Brazil. Approximately 189,000 Japanese entered Brazil by 1942 in mandatory family units. After the war, prewar immigrants and their descendants became quickly concentrated in São Paulo City. Immigration from Japan resumed in 1952, and by 1993 some 54,000 immigrants arrived in Brazil. By 1980, the majority of Japanese Brazilians had joined the urban middle class and many had been mixed racially. In the mid-1980s, Japanese Brazilians’ “return” labor migrations to Japan began on a large scale. More than 310,000 Brazilian citizens were residing in Japan in June 2008, when the centenary of Japanese immigration was widely celebrated in Brazil. The story does not end there. The global recession that started in 2008 soon forced unemployed Brazilians in Japan and their Japanese-born children to return to Brazil. Based on her research in Brazil and Japan, Mieko Nishida challenges the essentialized categories of “the Japanese” in Brazil and “Brazilians” in Japan, with special emphasis on gender. Nishida deftly argues that Japanese Brazilian identity has never been a static, fixed set of traits that can be counted and inventoried. Rather it is about being and becoming, a process of identity in motion responding to the push-and-pull between being positioned and positioning in a historically changing world. She examines Japanese immigrants and their descendants’ historically shifting sense of identity, which comes from their experiences of historical changes in socioeconomic and political structure in both Brazil and Japan. Each chapter illustrates how their identity is perpetually in formation, across generation, across gender, across class, across race, and in the movement of people between nations. Diaspora and Identity makes an important contribution to the understanding of the historical development of ethnic, racial, and national identities; as well as construction of the Japanese diaspora in Brazil and its response to time, place, and circumstances.

This book traces the rise and decline of Gilberto Freyre's vision of racial and cultural mixture (mestiçagem - or race mixing) as the defining feature of Brazilian culture in the twentieth century. Eakin traces how mestiçagem moved from a conversation among a small group of intellectuals to become the dominant feature of Brazilian national identity, demonstrating how diverse Brazilians embraced mestiçagem, via popular music, film and television, literature, soccer, and protest movements. The Freyrean vision of the unity of Brazilians built on mestiçagem begins a gradual decline in the 1980s with the emergence of an identity politics stressing racial differences and multiculturalism. The book combines intellectual history, sociological and anthropological field work, political science, and cultural studies for a wide-ranging analysis of how Brazilians - across social classes - became Brazilians.

Race on the Move takes readers on a journey from Brazil to the United States and back again to consider how migration between the two countries is changing Brazilians' understanding of race relations. Brazil once earned a global reputation as a racial paradise, and the United States is infamous for its overt social exclusion of nonwhites. Yet, given the growing Latino and multiracial populations in the United States, the use of quotas to address racial inequality in Brazil, and the flows of people between each country, contemporary race relations in each place are starting to resemble each other. Tiffany Joseph interviewed residents of Governador Valadares, Brazil's largest immigrant-sending city to the U.S., to ask how their immigrant experiences have transformed local racial understandings. Joseph identifies and examines a phenomenon—the transnational racial optic—through which migrants develop and ascribe social meaning to race in one country, incorporating conceptions of race from another. Analyzing the bi-directional exchange of racial ideals through the experiences of migrants, Race on the Move offers an innovative framework for understanding how race can be remade in immigrant-sending communities.

A fabled country with a reputation for danger, romance and intrigue, Brazil has transformed itself in the past decade. This title, written by the go-to journalist on Brazil, intimately portrays a country of contradictions, a country of passion and above all a country of immense power.